Business Analyst Simplifies Complexity for Reporting of Major Financial Services Provider (2018)
The Business Challenge
One of SA’s Major Financial Services groups needed to consolidate reporting that was decentralised across different divisions that were making use of a variety of reporting tools. The challenges included:
- The collation of data from disparate sources
- Including complex reporting based on custom-built financial risk models
- Lack of regulatory reporting for compliance that could lead to possible governance penalties
- Difficulty obtaining buy in from organisation-wide stakeholders
The Goal
The objective was to architect a reporting solution that:
- Would meet the functionality and usability needs of the different divisions
- Would include an industry best-of-breed analytics engine to cater for complex financial reporting requirements.
- Could be easily adopted by the divisions within the organisation (facilitate stakeholder buy-in) to ensure timeous delivery of the solution.
The Solution
The architecture and presentation of a diagram-based model, where the client could visually depict the end-to-end technical solution landscape and business users could understand the proposed process and solution.
The Approach
Our Business Analyst resource played a pivotal role in the project by:
- Designing the business analysis approach
- Developing the solution approach, scope and business case
- Conducting workshops to illicit and document the requirements
- Supporting the project management function.
- Producing outputs that included:
- A business case
- Business Requirement Specification (BRS)
- Functional requirements, context diagrams, processes, domain models, business rules, constraints functional and non-functional requirements
The Value
A clear understanding (model) of a reporting solution that addressed business and regulatory requirements. The model was used to obtain consensus and buy in from stakeholders and provided input to the implementation of a reporting solution.
BI helps grow tourism in the W Cape – WESGRO (2016)
Case Study
Details
The Business Challenge
- Disparate sources of information, with time consuming manual collation of data to produce reports.
- No consolidated view of tourism information to show trends and indicate fluctuation of the tourist market.
- Difficult for WESGRO to provide good quality information to clients to make decisions to influence and grow tourism in the Western Cape.
The Goal
To provide structured, categorised tourist information (demographics, behaviours, spend, preferred locations) in user-friendly formats that can be used in targeted marketing campaigns to attract tourists to the Western Cape.
The Scope
The intelligence needs of WESGRO’s Research Unit and Corporate Services (i.e. Finance, IT and HR) as well as Tourism, Trade, Investment, Economic, Corp Services and Air Access.
Our Approach
- Workshops to gather information.
- Application of the ‘design first’ methodology – data Analytics approach.
- Fast-tracked process following a Kimball methodology (ease of end user accessibility).
- Rapid Prototype development
The Solution
- Integration of data from disparate sources into subject areas organized by commonly understood business terms and validated for accuracy to ensure that the business can rely on it to make decisions
- Design of a central repository of information incorporating information from internal and external systems
- Implementation of Microsoft Power BI – with reports, portals, analytical and visualization tools that deliver user-friendly self-service charts and graphs.
The Value
- Quick time to market with a 2 month project.
- Rapid prototypes to quickly establish and confirm solution benefits.
- Upskilled, self-sufficient resources able to update and maintain the databases and develop dashboards.
- Consolidated, visually represented information to give WESGRO greater understanding of tourism in the Western Cape to use in the growth of the tourist industry.